The Human Condition

I'm looking around at the available research that has been carried out on young humans, and what I have clearly found is that our humanity is evidenced in the fetus before birth.

I'm looking for basic pre-socialization qualities of humans. Two fundamental behaviours that are emerging to me:

1. We learn through response to stimuli
2. Once we've learned something we have a preference for it over something that we haven't learned (ie. We prefer the familiar to the unfamiliar)

(2) may well be because the new born baby needs to recognize and positively respond to it's mother's voice, the one who will be caring for it.

I can easily see how (2) can lead to:

"I'm right and you are wrong"
"My religion is right and yours is wrong"

and so of course to ...

wars.

I'm reminded of p53, a tumour suppressing protein that we all naturally manufacture. It's job is to kill cancer cells, but it often kills temporarily damaged good cells because it thinks that have got cancer but are in fact just damaged and would eventually heal if they hadn't been killed off by p53. The body (and mind it would appear) uses a raggedy bag of thrown together tricks to survive, and they're not always optimal, but they're good enough for survival - so far.